The Symptomatology of a Universalized Concept of Trauma: On the Failing of Freud's Reading of Tasso in the Trauma of History

Abstract

Over the last decade the concept of has enjoyed a meteoric development. In the transformation of trauma from clinical concept to model for the interpretation of culture, however, the term is threatened increasingly to lose its analytical-theoretical profile. This renaissance is clearly rooted in the after-history of the Holocaust. But the application of the term to extremely diverse phenomena and its extension to the discourse of a century of catastrophes has led to its becoming severed from the respective concrete historical events. And the most recent outcome of this process is that the concept of history itself has been subsumed in a universalized conceptualization of trauma. Here, not only the cultural history of traumatic events is lost from view, but also the scientific history of the concept. Paradigmatic for this trend is Cathy Caruth's 1996 book Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, History,l which also marks an ethical turning-point in American deconstructive theory. This book can be seen as the symptom for a common way of dealing with history in cultural theory, as an examination of its theoretical operations, its readings, and the latter's significant oversights will demonstrate.